Suggestions?

[d_aulnoy]

Every time I teach my YA lit class, I wind up with a couple of outliers.  The YA class is generally intended for people who want to teach high school, so it carriers a field experience component ... but every term, I wind up with a couple of people who are just taking the class because they, well, like YA lit.  And who am I to complain?

So every term, instead of their spending 4 hours at a local high school observing classes and then however many hours writing up the 5 page report on it that I require, I have them read a contemporary, ideally very-recently-published YA book and report on that instead.  Last term, I gave them Little Brother, but then I decided I liked it enough to sub it in for Ender's Game and just teach it outright.  So now I'm looking for a good book to assign for this term.  Y'all got any faves that you'd like to point me towards?
 

Comments

[rosefox]

Flora Segunda!

[penmage.livejournal.com]

Does it have to be SF? I highly recommend Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta.

Other non-SF noteworthy YA:
Paper Towns by John Green
Me, The Missing and the Dead by Jenny Valentine

In SF:
The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness.
The Explosionist by Jenny Davidson (sort of a YA Farthing)
Nation by Terry Pratchett

[ninja-turbo.livejournal.com]

Uglies, by Scott Westerfield -- futuristic sociological SF in a CW-channel distopia.

[shweta-narayan.livejournal.com]

How 'bout Ellen Kushner's Privilege of the Sword?

[erica-ac.livejournal.com]

The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins might be good, or Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan, but I think I'm rooting for Flora or Green Glass Sea.

And I recommend Bookshelves of Doom, a blog that posts a lot of great YA novel reviews (and, lately, quite a bit of Twilight-related funniness) if you haven't found it yet.

[fjm.livejournal.com]

Anything by Frances Hardinge.